profitless controversies.  It commonly happens in such controversies, as it undoubtedly has happened in the dispute about free-will, that both parties have been trying to pull up Life or Spirit by the roots, and make a show, a la Barnum, of all its secrets.  The enterprise was zealously prosecuted, but would not prosper.  In truth, there are strict and jealous limits to the degree in which man’s mind can become an object to itself.  By silent consciousness, by an action of reason and imagination sympathetic with pure inward life, man may feel far down into the sweet, awful depths and mysteries of his being; and the results of this inward intimation are given in the great poems, the great art and divine philosophy of all time, and in the commanding beliefs of mankind; but so soon as one begins to come to his own existence as an outsider and stranger, and attempts to bear away its secret, so soon he begins to be balked.

Mr. Buckle, however, has assumed in a summary and authoritative way to settle this question of free-will; and, without entering into the dust and suffocation of the old interminable dispute, we may follow him far enough to see whether he has thrown any light upon the matter, or has only thrown light upon his own powers as a thinker.

His direct polemic against the doctrine of Free-Will consists simply of an attempt to identify it with the notion of Chance in physics.  The notion of Chance, he says, is the same with that of Free-Will; the doctrine of Necessary Connection with the dogma of Predestination.  This statement has certainly an imposing air.  But consider it.  To assert the identity of chance and free-will is but another way of saying that pure freedom is one and the same with absolute lawlessness,—­that where freedom exists, law, order, reason do not.  If this be a misconception, as it surely is a total and fatal misconception, of the nature of freedom, then does the statement of our author, with all that rests upon it, fall instantly and utterly to the ground.

It is a misconception.  Freedom and lawlessness are not the same.  To make this finally clear, let us at once give the argument the widest possible scope; since the largest way of looking at the matter, as indeed it often happens, will prove also the nearest and simplest.  In the universe as a whole Will does certainly originate, since there is, undoubtedly, origination somewhere.  Freely, too, it must arise, for there is nothing behind it to bring it under constraint:  indeed, all origination is by its nature free.  But our philosopher tells us that wherever there is a pure and free origination of will, there is lawlessness, caprice, chance.  The universe, therefore, should be a scene, not of absolute order, but of absolute disorder; and since it is not such, we have nothing for it but to say that either the logic of the universe, or that of Mr. Buckle, is very much awry.

In the universe, Will freely originates, but forever in unison with divine Reason; and the result is at once pure necessity and pure freedom:  for these, if both be, as we say, absolutely pure, are one and the same.  A coercing necessity is impure, for it is at war with that to which it applies; only a necessity in sweetest affinity with that which it governs is of the purest degree; and this is, of course, identical with the highest and divinest freedom.